Seventeen Against the Dealer (15 page)

“There are only three more sets of exams you have to take,” Dicey said.

“I know.” Maybeth's voice had a smile in it. “I can do it three more times. Maybe I'll graduate from high school.”

“Is that something you want?” Dicey asked.

“Yes,” Maybeth answered. “I might not be able to, because everything keeps getting harder, but if I could I'd like that.”

“Why?” Dicey wondered.

“It would make a good ending,” Maybeth explained.

“Ending to what?” Sammy asked.

“Ending to me being in school, because—when you do something, it's better if there's a good ending.” She explained what she meant: “Just because you work hard doesn't mean you'll get your good ending.”

“If it's possible,” Sammy said, in a voice that made Dicey wonder what was going on in his mind, in his life.

“I'd like to graduate, and have everybody come to see me graduate.”

“I'll be there,” Sammy promised. “You, too, won't you, Dicey? We'll be there with bells on and banners flying and—you know, Maybeth, I used to think you shouldn't have to go to school—”

“But I want to. How else would I learn something? Just because you're not good at something doesn't mean you don't get to do it, does it?”

“What gets me,” Sammy said, “is when you
are
good at something, and still don't get to do it.”

Dicey could sympathize with that. She didn't know how good
she was at building boats, and she kept trying to find out, but things kept getting in her way, things like time and money. Not people—the people she knew knew better than to get in her way.

It wasn't until she lay in bed that night, falling into sleep, that a question drifted across her mind. She was too tired to catch it. It was like when you see something out of the corner of your eye, some movement in the shadows at the far boundary of vision—that's what the question was like. By the time she had noticed it, and said to herself that there was something there she might want to see clearly, and found the right muscles to turn her mental eyes to catch it, and seen what it was—she was asleep.

T
he alarm cut through the darkness like a spotlight suddenly turned on. Dicey was up and dressed, washed and fed, and out the door, with the day's work outlined in her head, before anyone else stirred in the silent house. She rode her bike through filmy gray predawn light. Air sounds were all she could hear—the whirring of air through the tires of the bike, the rush of air by her ears.

She had figured out a way to work on all four of the rowboats at the same time. Maybe. If she moved the low wooden rack at the center of the floor over to the worktable—and she wasn't using the worktable, so it didn't matter whether the space around it was clear—if she spread out plastic sheeting to protect the cement—she should have room for all four of the rowboats on the floor of the shop. If she had all four spread out, she would waste less time waiting for a coat of paint to dry. If she painted the ones nearest the stove first, then the heat would make them dry faster. A good morning's work, that was what she needed.

A good morning's work was what she put in, band after band of paint streaking off her brush. When she finally straightened up—it was early afternoon, to judge by the messages her stomach was sending her—the insides of all four boats had been painted with their first coats. The two by the stove were still slightly tacky to her fingertips, and she decided she'd go home,
have lunch, and then maybe bring the truck over after a couple of hours, so she could drive home when she was finished for the day. Maybe she'd bring Maybeth, too, to help her flip the boats; that would make more sense, having Maybeth to help turn them over and shift them around.

In the meantime she could write Jeff, a long letter, the kind of long letter that felt as if she was talking to him. Since she couldn't actually talk to him she'd write—which cost a lot less, anyway. She hadn't talked to Jeff since—it was only two weeks, she figured it out, but it felt much longer.

Gram was in the kitchen when Dicey got home, Gram sitting down for once, with a teapot, a mug, a jar of honey and a lemon, and a thick book. Dicey was too hungry even to toast the bread for her peanut butter sandwich. “What're you reading?”

“Dickens. What are you doing home?”

“A coat of paint is drying. It'll take another couple of hours. Is Maybeth here?”

“She went shopping, up to Salisbury, a gaggle of them—somebody's having a sale and somebody else has some money. You know how girls are.”

Gram knew perfectly well Dicey didn't know how girls were, and, furthermore, Gram knew Dicey knew she knew that. “How about you?” Dicey asked. “How are you feeling?”

“Not worse,” Gram said, “and that's something these days. I think I've broken the back of this cough.” Gram's cheeks were too pink, and her eyes were too bright; her voice sounded rough-edged, too deep; her voice sounded chesty. Gram said she was getting better, but Dicey wasn't sure about that. She didn't feel like quarreling with Gram, however, so she asked instead, “What time does Sammy get off work?”

“I expect him momently,” Gram told her, and then smiled. Gram's smiles moved so fast across her face, if you weren't watching
you'd miss them entirely. “Do you know how long I've wanted to be able to use that word—momently—in a normal conversation?”

Dicey smiled back. “No.”

“That's a relief. I sometimes think—sometimes I'm afraid you can read my mind. And there are a lot of things going on up there that are none of your business, girl, or that I'd just as soon not trouble you with. So I'm glad to know you can't read my mind. Although,” Gram continued, “sometimes I think I can read yours.”

Dicey thought about the same, and it didn't trouble her.

“D'you mind?” Gram asked her. “I would.”

“No. Because you can't read it, not really,” Dicey said.

“Probably a good thing, too,” Gram said. “There's mail for you. And don't bother yelling at me about going outside—Maybeth brought it in. I haven't stirred out of my own doors for—a week now, almost. It feels like a year.”

The mail wasn't a letter from Jeff, but it
was
a check from the dentist in Salisbury, for twenty-five dollars. If Cisco came back again, Dicey thought, she could tell him he'd succeeded. She signed the check over to Gram. Gram didn't refuse to take it, although from the look she gave Dicey, Dicey wondered if Gram didn't have a pretty good idea of how tight money was in the business. “I'm due over three hundred dollars, from Claude,” she told her grandmother. “I finished the first ten of those boats, and I sent him the bill.” Sammy entered the kitchen at that news and pronounced it satisfactory. Saturday was payday for him, and he took ten dollars out of the envelope before handing it to Gram.

“Looks like we can make it through another month now,” Gram said. “If your sister will let me out of the house to go to the bank and make a deposit. That was a joke,” she said, looking
from one to the other of them. “Don't bother telling me how bad a joke it was. Go away and let me read.”

“I wanted to ask Dicey something, anyway.” Sammy's face was red from the long bike ride home. He blew on his hands. “I should've worn mittens. The January thaw is sure over.”

“But it's just the beginning of January. How can the thaw be already over?” Dicey asked.

“Cripes, Dicey, where is your mind? It's almost February. No, I'm serious, it is. In fact, it's almost”—he grinned at his grandmother—“Valentine's Day.”

Gram humphed. Dicey spoke quickly, before Gram could get going on what she called the proliferation of holidays, appearing like rabbits all over the calendar. Somebody, Gram maintained, was making a fortune out of all of these brand-spanking-new holidays, with the paint not dry on them. But Gram was too busy trying not to cough to get started on her speech.

“I was going to ask if you could help me out for a while this afternoon,” Dicey asked Sammy. “Moving boats around. I'll give you my full attention about whatever. It won't take long to move them. But we'd have to ride our bikes.”

“I have to be back for dinner,” he said.

“Nobody has to be here for dinner,” Gram snapped, and then she started coughing, a deep, chesty cough. She waved her hands at them to say she was all right, and coughed. She tried to drink some tea, and coughed. Dicey looked at Sammy, and felt him asking the same unspoken question she was, which neither of them could answer. In a couple of minutes the coughing subsided. Gram sat bent over for a minute, as if she was catching her breath after some race, some running race. Then she drank off her mug of tea. “And don't you two look at me like that. I tell you it's getting better.”

If this was better, Dicey thought, worse must have been pretty bad.

“I
want
to be home for dinner,” Sammy got back to the argument.

“Nobody ever said you didn't,” Gram answered, pouring herself another mug of tea, squeezing lemon into it, spooning honey. “I don't even like honey and lemon in my tea,” she complained.

“Then let's get going,” Sammy said to Dicey.

At the shop they shifted the rowboats around and turned them over. “This is like turning the mattresses in the spring,” Sammy said. “Want me to put masking tape along the waterline for you? You do one side and I'll do the other, and I could tell you.”

“Great,” Dicey said. “Thanks.” She got to work, peeling off tape, setting it evenly along the top of the painted bottom, ripping an arm's length of tape off the roller. “So, tell,” she asked. “Tell me whatever it is you want to tell me.”

“They turned me down.”

“They what? What they?”

“That tennis camp.”

“The one you were talking about?”

Sammy nodded.

“The one in Arizona?”

He nodded.

“Did you actually send in an application?”

“Yeah. That part was okay. It's when I asked for a scholarship that they turned me down. It was a nice letter, they sounded sorry, but they said no. The list of tournaments I've played in, and how I placed, didn't give them enough to go on, for all that money. Because the scholarship is for a lot of money. Because, if I were in Arizona they'd know what the competition was like. Or California. But because I'm not—and they've never seen me play.”

“That's hard on you,” Dicey said.

“Maybe they're right. I mean, maybe I'm a big fish in a little pond here, in my pond, but I wouldn't be such a big fish in their pond. I just wish—”

Dicey knew what he wished. He wished he could go to that tennis camp.

“The letter really was nice. They said they hoped I could find a way of being able to enroll, even without the scholarship.”

“Can you?” Dicey wondered.

“Dicey.” He looked at her across the flat-bottomed rowboat, half-amused; half-annoyed. “Do you have any idea what it costs? It costs sixty-five hundred dollars.”

Dicey just stared at him.

Sammy just stared back at her.

“Oh, Sammy,” she said. There was no way any of them, even putting everything together, could afford that. For a summer camp. Nor even for a tennis camp, not even for Sammy could they come up with that kind of money. “That's terrible.”

“Plus the airfare there and back,” he added. “I just wanted to tell you,” Sammy said.

“I know.”

“Because what really gets me is, I could work, if I dropped out of school, and if I worked a couple of jobs I could save up the money—not for this summer but for next—and then I could afford the camp, but if I did that then I wouldn't be playing tennis in the meantime, not competitive tennis, so . . .”

Dicey knew what he meant, but didn't see any purpose in repeating that. She didn't have any ideas, either. She could probably, if she had to, work nights in the spring and earn his airfare, and she wouldn't mind doing that, for tennis camp, for Sammy. But coming up with sixty-five hundred dollars—

“All I can do is work,” Sammy said, working steadily while he talked, “and even then, even if I do that, it won't get me what I want.”

They taped in silence for a while.

“I should stop wanting it,” Sammy said.

Dicey didn't know about that.

“But just because you aren't good enough, or rich enough, to be able to get something, that doesn't mean you have to give up wanting it, does it?” he asked her.

Dicey didn't know.

“And I
am
good enough,” he said.

Dicey nodded.

“Anyway, I just wanted to tell you.” He was waiting for her to answer him, but she didn't have any answer for him.

“All I can say is—I know what you mean,” Dicey said.

He lifted his head and grinned across at her. “Yeah, I know. I guess that's what I wanted to hear.”

Sammy, Dicey thought, took his knocks standing up. While she was thinking about how to say that to him, to tell him how proud she was of him, he changed the subject. “What about Phil? I think it's okay for Maybeth to go out with him, and so does James. Do you?”

“Has he asked her?”

“Once, before he went back to school, but Maybeth says he will again, she hopes, maybe.”

“You're worried because he's so much older? I always liked him.”

“Except he seems like the kind of guy she might fall in love with.”

“Would you mind that?”

“Not a bit. Except, I figure Momma must have fallen in love, too.”

Dicey thought she understood what he was asking her. “But Maybeth isn't going to have to run away from home if she wants to love someone, not like Momma did. It's not the same at all.”

“You're really sure about that, aren't you?”